Dowd, in today’s New York Times (article only available-fucking fascists- to Times Select members):

“Hillary has been wielding Bill as a bludgeon on support and money. If you were ever behind him, you’d better fall into line behind her. But doesn’t that undermine her presentation of herself as a self-reliant feminist aiming to be the first Madame President? If you can only win by leaning so heavily on your man for your muscle, isn’t that a benign form of paternalism?”

The short answer: No, it isn’t.

The long answer: Why are you glib? Do you think you’re clever? Okay, so your argument might hold some water. It might. If you were talking about anybody other than one of the most popular and charismatic Americans ever. And when your husband is Bill Clinton, I’m sorry, but you’re going to be connected to him, and he’s going to campaign with you, and this doesn’t make Hillary any less of a feminist, whether you agree with her politics and personality or not. As first lady, Hillary was involved in her husband’s administration, much more closely than others before and since. So would it not follow logically that her campaign for the presidency would be in part a continuation of the policies and goals they pursued together from 1992 to 2000? I mean, duh?

Maybe you think Hillary sucks, and that she has a history of kissing conservative ass, and that her run for office smacks of a dynastic element we’d like to see absent from American politics, at least where the presidency’s concerned. Maybe you think she shouldn’t be running at all. Wev. But campaigning with one’s family is de rigueur. And when one’s family includes William Jefferson fucking Clinton, you bring him along to your rallies because when he waves his chubby little hand it makes people smile and long for the days when we had a president who could complete the Tuesday crossword. So, like, get over it and stop waving the ‘you’re not a real feminist’ flag around, because it’s beginning to seem like you just can’t think of anything better to say.

And when one’s family includes William Jefferson fucking Clinton, you bring him along to your rallies because when he waves his chubby little hand it makes people smile and long for the days when we had a president who could complete the Tuesday crossword.

LOL! Fucking right on.

Dowd’s problem–as usual–is that she doesn’t have the vaguest understanding of what feminism actually is. Her feminism seems to be a collection of idiotic formulations drawn from profoundly anti-feminist sources.

Being a feminist doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to rely on your spouse. Which, of course, Dowd knows somewhere deep down in her dippy little head, because she wouldn’t make the same argument (or be able to) if she were talking about a lesbian couple, dependent as her dubious theory is on the fact that Hillary’s spouse is a man. So, she considers feminism to be about man-hating. (Anti-feminist talking point #1.)

Being a feminist also doesn’t mean you are required to pretend that “self-reliant” means “never accepting help, even when it is to your own benefit to accept it.” Male candidates are not criticized for drawing on their wives’ talents; that Dowd suggests female feminist candidates are poseurs and weaklings if they draw on their husbands’ talents is indicative that she considers feminism to be about female supremacy–feminists must be better than men. (Anti-feminist talking point #2.)

I could go on and on, but you get the drift. She’s the ultimate feminist concern troll, and I wish she would take your advice and shut the hell up.

America has a long and storied history of sex scandals helping a president’s popularity, not hurting it. Couple that with Bill actually being, ya know, a competent leader, he would be a great asset on a campaign. So yeah, I’m with Hillary on that.

i liked dowd better when she was on vacation. some of the guest writers really kicked her ass. if hillary was a front to set up a shadow presidency for big dog, i’d be down with that. but i think she really intends to marginalize his input, kinda like shrub refusing to talk to his daddy. she wants to have her own show and say “see how it feels to be stuck outside while all the cool kids are playing post office?”

Maureen Dowd is dumb. But that’s beside the point. I really just wanted to say that Times Select is available free to students and faculty. Just fyi. I wouldn’t even get to read her tripe (for free)if I wasn’t going to school right now. Lucky me!

I liked (a little) some of her early-on anti-Bush snark, but Molly Ivins was my go-to girl for that, to be honest. MoDo always winds up sounding so faux-snappy and alliterative or rhyming, and while a clever sentence can brighten an essay that would otherwise be ditchwater-dull, an entire string of them sounds like one is auditioning for a job at Saatchi and Saatchi or something. Annoying as hell. It’s a political column, not a toilet cleaner ad, for Christ’s sake!

I wish people would focus on her accomplishments and qualifications. Or the lack thereof, if that’s how they see HRC’s life. I happen to like her very much, in no small part because of her choice in husbands, believe it or not. And I have the same issues with Hillary that most everyone else around here does.

But so many journalists either patronize her (Big Dawg and his Little Lady!) or concern-troll her to pieces.

Hillary is blazingly intelligent; many insiders say she was hand-in-hand (brain-in-brain?) with Bill on some (if not many) of his best moves.

You go to war the election with the spouse you have….and quite likely the person you want to be with. I have always (really) believed that Hil was the more brilliant of the pair and likely was holding back just a bit ..
The right really fears this team and wants very much to see them separated …

Exactly. They can’t compete with her on that level, so they denigrate and belittle her, insisting she bake cookies to prove she’s a lady and all that. They’re just so scared of a smart woman. Even when they are arguing against her policies and ideas they somehow come around to her being a woman as the reason her ideas don’t stand up over time.

Usually when someone starts going into that around me, I just ask when Dubya had a sex change, since his ideas are shit, too.

It’s fascinating how MSM types seem to bounce their analyses between Bill-Clinton-as-albatross and Bill-Clinton-as-Hillary’s-greatest-asset.

Frankly, she’d be silly to distance herself and ignore the residual goodwill he can bring to her campaign. And let’s face it, if she *did* try to ‘stand on her own’, we’d probably be hearing MSM psuedofeminist columnists cluck and tsk about how Hillary is trying too hard to prove herself and not stand in Bill’s shadow. There’s no pleasing that kind of critic, frankling.

urgh. That’ll teach me to proofread more. Not only did I attempt to start and end the same paragraph with “frankly” (overuse!), I made a typo the second time around and mutated it into some kind of hellish gerund wanna-be. That’s just sad.